


IT and Draconic Nonsense

by cactusprisms



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Dragons, Eating rocks as an intimidation tactic, Gen, Just toss on dragons and shake, Tessa is going to strangle Elias one of these days, not for murder but because he fakes being technologically inept, the life and times of the magnus institute’s IT division
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24389068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cactusprisms/pseuds/cactusprisms
Summary: The antics of the Magnus Institute's IT department, wherein there are a total of two IT techs, and one of them is a dragon.Or; I have this nasty habit of throwing dragons into different fandoms and shaking it around like a drink mixer, and you know what? It really works here.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	IT and Draconic Nonsense

**Author's Note:**

> Behold! My utter nonsense! I have a distinct love of dragons and just went, you know what my favorite horror podcast could use? Giant, fire breathing, flying lizards. That can shapeshift! Even better!

  
The fears, the entities, didn’t always exist. They themselves were always linked with sentient, and more pertinently, human, development. As humans grew to fear the dark, the dark grew a mind with which to scare them with. Almost symbiosis, except the fear was far longer lived. More grew as human minds grew more complex, as language developed and more abstract forms of fear formed.

But before humans there were dinosaurs, and dinosaurs had very little on their minds but the three F’s of survival, pea brained as they were. No strong fear could come from that, and those that had enough brain to have stronger fears didn’t have much to fear at all. This is because there was a space, a vacuum, which nothing but the universe itself had quite realized was empty. But the universe did, and vacuums demand to be filled, so it was. With a particular type of intelligent long-lived dinosaur. The ancestor of what would come to be called a dragon.

When one is a hyper intelligent, fire-breathing, winged predator, there really isn’t much to fear, given that the predator in question is the biggest one on the planet. Hyper intelligence was also relative, given the state of intelligence in the surrounding population of bird creatures.

Millions of years pass, humanity evolves, and the dragons, who have also evolved and are markedly smarter than they used to be, see the development of these new fear entities that come with the brains of hundreds of thousands of short lived monkeys and just, shrug, because yeah, okay, that’s happening now.

Some dragons ally themselves with the entities, others just leave well enough alone because it’s not like they need to fear something like that. Some dragons torment the growing sentient population of monkeys, because in every species, there are assholes. It all varies really, but the creatures were there before the miasma of fears gathered, and it wasn’t like they were leaving anytime soon.

**The Magnus Institute, IT Department, December 2016**

  
A woman named Tessa Draconte sat at her computer, attempting to curse everything under the sun, and the sky blue, if possible. She had curly hair that was so dark it tended to appear blue to most people’s eyes, or if they were having a particularly interesting brain day, it would refract the light like the feathers of a black bird. The hair was pulled up in a very angry bun and had been stuck with three pencils, a pen, and an antique letter opener. None of her coworkers knew where or when she had gotten the letter opener. Her eyes were a hazel that often appeared gold. She wore no glasses, had a few freckles, and seemingly had very few lines on her face. She looked like a woman in her early 20’s

According to her papers, she was about 32. Both of these notions of age were, of course, false. She was actually around 256, but thought she was 253, because she had lost track a few years ago while taking a nap, and never actually updated herself. She was of the impression it was 2013, but genuinely just didn’t care, nor did she ever actually register the date at the bottom right corner of her computer screen.

See, Tessa Draconte was not human, nor had she ever been. She was actually a debatably reptilian-or-avian being known as a dragon. Very few people had ever actually learned this. Comparably, very few people ever would.

But for now, she was cursing at the screen. And her coworkers. Not the other IT techs no. She was cursing at the archivists, the boss, and files. Less at files, actually, they were trying.

The archivists, on the other hand…

“Hey Jake?” she called out to her fellow IT technical support. Jake, a fairly cheerful fellow, popped around the doorframe.

“Is it the archive again?” Jake asked with much amusement.

Tessa groaned, and put her face on her desk, “yes,” she said, muffled, “And files. And Elias.”

Jake snorted, “which one do you want?”

“All of them are annoying,” she bemoaned, “I was gonna ask you that.”

Jake shrugged, “Guess I’ll take files, poor bastards. Save them from themselves.”

Tessa snorted. 

Tessa and Jake were the only two IT techs the Magnus Institute employed. This was not because they didn’t have a lot of need for IT techs, but because the institute itself seemed stuck somewhere between the stone age and world war 2 when it came to technology. Tessa would know. She had seen technology evolve. She was probably one of the best when it came to deciphering computers.

Tessa sighed, drummed a little beat on her desk, and stood up, “well, guess I’ll go chew out Elias, then.”

“Have fun,” Jake said with a wave, making off towards files.

Tessa groaned again, and set off towards Elias’s office.

* * *

Tessa popped into Elias’s office without so much as a knock, “hey, bossman! How did you fuck up technologically this time?”

Elias sighed, “Tessa, how many times have I told you to mind your language in the work environment?”

“Too many times to count, and at least one more time after this,” she said merrily, “technological fuckup, what hath you done, sir?”

Elias sighed, “I accidentally deleted my spreadsheet. Can I get it back?”

“What application was it on?” Tessa meandered about the desk to peer at the screen over Elias’s shoulder.

“Microsoft.”

“Mmm,” Tessa confiscated the mouse and clicked at things, idly. She pulled up the recently deleted bar, clicked the last spreadsheet, and gestured triumphantly at the screen, “Tadah! I swear you’re an old man some days, boss. Look at the recently deleted, they usually save backups. But also try not to delete things.”

Elias smiled, “Thank you Tessa, that’s a great help.”

Tessa waved him off, “‘tis the job you pay me for, so it’s no problem. If you excuse me, I have to go save the archivists.”

“Oh do be nice,” Elias said chidingly, “they don’t mean it.”

“Ehn,” Tessa shrugged as she left, closing the door behind her. She shuddered once out of view, the damn man always gave her such unnerving feelings, like he was trying to touch her mind, but he wasn’t remotely going about it correctly. It happened every time she went in that room. She let out a breath, and carried on.

The archive, below ground and cool, was almost comforting. The air was filled with the scent of old books and dry stone, and the taste of stories she had not yet gotten to read. Hoards were weird like that; they started attracting your attention more and more over the years. Probably why mum was so enamored with Duolingo, and the notion of coding as a language.

She knocked on the archivist’s door. There was a disgruntled noise from the man inside, and a terse, “come in.”

She poked her head inside, “Hey, it’s IT, who’s done goofed, computerwise?”

The archivist made yet another disgruntled noise, “Me,” he said, sounding disproportionately harassed.

Tessa slid in, “okay, tell me what’s up.”

The archivist sighed, “these statements won’t record to my computer. Some will, but others,” he gestured to a stack of papers, “come out sounding like this.” he pressed a key on the laptop. It started playing audio, the archivist’s voice came out just fine.

“What-” she began, as the recording recited the date and the time the statement was given, the date of recording, and by whom.

“No, just- listen,” The archivist cut her off as the statement itself began, and the audio came out screeching static, painful to her ears, undercut with the archivist’s voice. Tessa squawked, and clapped her hands over her ears.

The archivist sighed, and stopped the audio, “do you see what I mean?”

Tessa removed her hands from her ears, “oh yeah, I um, you said others were recording just fine?”

“They were.”

“Right, well. With the ones that you can’t get on the computer, I recommend going a bit lower tech. Tape recorders would probably work. I’ve got a few recorders up in IT from when Gertrude was still here, along with tapes themselves, I can bring some down if you’d like?”

The archivist rubbed a hand over his face, “this is what I am forced to turn to,” he muttered, and sighed, “that would be great, thanks.”

“No problem, just doing my job.” she paused, “Which isn’t much, usually just yelling at Elias for messing up his files again. Have you lot been using flash drives, by the way? There’s far less of a chance of losing files if your hard drive corrupts.”

“...we have not. Should we start doing that?”

“Probably.” Tessa said blithely.

The archivist nodded, “hurry back with the tapes.”

“You got it!” Tessa gave him a two fingered salute, and bounced off. 

* * *

“Jake, buddy, so you know how we work at the Spooky Institute?” Tessa swung around the corner into the IT offices and started rummaging in their utility closet.

“I was aware, yes.” Jake was disassembling a keyboard, his tongue sticking partly out of his mouth.

“Some of the statements are so spooky they refuse to go on the computer. That was what was up with archives, by the way, not the,” she snorted, “computer exploding, like they used to be with Gertrude as the archivist. I’m taking down the spare tape recorders and tapes.”

“Oh, well that’s good,” Jake said, pressing a few keys to see them pop up, “hopefully that’ll continue, files, on the other hand, continue to need saving from themselves. They fried nearly an entire computer, but I’m attempting to save it.”

“Oh christ on a cracker, really?” Tessa poked her head out of the closet.

Jake held up the board, and gestured to a monitor and console on his desk.

“What the fuck, files,” Tessa said incredulously, returning to rummaging, “Elias deleted a file and couldn’t get it back again. He does things like he’s a doddering old man who refuses to learn how to use a computer, and insists on getting his grandchild to explain everything, despite the grandchild having explained it all yesterday.”

“For all we know, he could be that. Like. Spiritually.”

Tessa hummed, before making a victorious sound upon finding her quarry, “I wouldn’t doubt it, honestly. There was a big enough personality change when he accepted the offer for head of the institute.”

Jake snickered, “James Wright snatched his body so he could continue on being the institute head. He never learned how to use technology right, so now he’s just the doddering old granddad, except about everything, always.”

“I’d believe it,” Tessa said, shoving tapes in the crook of her arm, “also, I found two recorders, so I’m gonna leave one in here, with some of the empty tapes. You think archives is filled with people who have enough braincells to get more and charge Elias when they run out?”

“Dunno,” Jake unscrewed something, “but they’ll come to us if they don’t, so I guess we’ll see.”

“Shall see indeed,” Tessa kicked the door open, “I’ll be back to help you with that in a bit, yeah?”

“Mhm,” Jake said distractedly.

“Cool,” Tessa said, and left.

**Author's Note:**

> I genuinely did not know where to end it so assume the tapes were delivered and Tessa went back to help with the destroyed computer. The IT department hates working here but also the pay is really good and they're the only ones with common sense. Tessa may end up hunting not!sasha for sport though.
> 
>   
> Also someone tell me if I get the dates wrong, I swear to god, I can't remember shit


End file.
